In the wireless communication technology, when a base station side (e.g., evolved NodeB, i.e., eNB) transmits data using a plurality of antennas, a spatial multiplexing mode may be employed to increase the data transmission rate, i.e., a transmitting end using the same time-frequency resource to transmit different data at different antenna positions, and a receiving end (e.g., user equipment (UE)) may also receive data using a plurality of antennas. Under a single-user scenario, all antenna resources are allocated to the same user, and the user exclusively occupies the physical resources allocated by the base station side during one transmission interval, this transmission mode is called Single User Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (SU-MIMO). Under a multi-user scenario, space resources of different antennas are allocated to different users, and a user and at least one another user share the physical resources allocated by the base station side during one transmission interval, the share mode being a space division multiple access mode or a space division multiplexing mode, this transmission mode is called Multiple User Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO), where the physical resources allocated by the base station side refer to time-frequency resources. If a transmission system support both of SU-MIMO and MU-MIMO at the same time, the eNB needs to provide data related to these two modes to the UE. The UE under either SU-MIMO mode or MU-MIMO mode needs to acquire the rank that the eNB employs for transmission of MIMO data. In the SU-MIMO mode, all antenna resources are allocated to the same user, the number of layers used for transmission of MIMO data is equal to the rank that the eNB employs for transmission of MIMO data. In the MU-MIMO mode, the number of layers used for the transmission corresponding to one user is less than the total number of layers that the eNB employ for transmission of MIMO data. If the switching between the SU-MIMO mode and the MU-MIMO mode needs to be carried out, the eNB needs to notify the UE of different control data in different transmission modes.
Three downlink physical control channels are defined in Long-Term Evolution (LTE) Release 8: Physical Control Format Indicator Channel (PCFICH), Physical Hybrid Automatic Retransmission Request Indicator Channel (PHICH) and Physical Downlink Control Channel (PDCCH). PDCCH is used for carrying Downlink Control Information (DCI), including uplink and downlink scheduling information, and uplink power control information. The DCI format includes DCI format 0, DCI format 1, DCI format 1A, DCI format 1B, DCI format 1C, DCI format 1D, DCI format 2, DCI format 2A, DCI format 3, DCI format 3A. The transmission mode 5 supporting MU-MIMO uses downlink control information of DCI format 1D, and the downlink power offset field δpower-offset in the DCI format 1D is used to indicate the information of reducing the power for one user by half (i.e., −10 log 10 (2)) in the MU-MIMO mode. Because the MU-MIMO transmission mode 5 only supports the MU-MIMO transmission of two users, through the downlink power offset field, the MU-MIMO transmission mode 5 may support dynamic switching between the SU-MIMO mode and the MU-MIMO mode. However, no matter in the SU-MIMO mode or in the MU-MIMO mode, this DCI format only supports transmission of one stream for one UE, although the transmission mode 4 in LTE Release 8 supports transmission of at most two streams for single-user, the LTE Release 8 cannot carry out dynamic switching of single-user multi-stream transmission and multi-user transmission, because the switching between transmission modes can only be semi-static.
In LTE Release 9, a transmission mode of double-stream beamforming is introduced for enhancing the downlink multi-antenna transmission, DCI format 2B is added for the downlink control information to support this transmission mode, the downlink control information processing method and device may have a scrambling identity (SCID) identifier bit to support two different scrambling sequences, and the eNB may allocate the two scrambling sequences to different users for multiplexing of the same resource for multiple users. In addition, when there is only one transmission block enabled, a new data indication (NDI) bit corresponding to a disabled transmission block is also used for indicating antenna ports in single-layer transmission.
In LTE Release 10, a transmission mode supporting dynamic switching between single-user MIMO and multi-user MIMO is introduced to support transmission of at least 8 layers, DCI format 2C is added for the downlink control information to support this transmission mode, and the downlink control information processing method and device may have a joint coding identifier bit of the scrambling identity, the antenna port, and the number of layers, wherein the 8 antenna ports can support at least 8 layers of single-user MIMO transmission, and the scrambling identity supports multi-user MIMO transmission.
In LTE Release 11, based on the transmission mode supporting dynamic switching between single-user MIMO and multi-user MIMO modes, a transmission mode of Coordinated Multi-point Transmission (COMP) is introduced, and the COMP technology is mainly used for increasing the cell edge throughput. The current downlink control information can only increase the cell edge data throughput, but cannot support the interference coordination of reference signals between cells (e.g., between a macro base station and a micro base station, and between a macro base station and another macro base station), such that if resource mapping is not carried out correctly according to the node selection, the reference signals will overlap the data resources to greatly interfere the data so as to affect the demodulation performance of the terminal and the spectral efficiency of the system.
Hence, there is a problem in the related art that control information cannot support the processing of interference coordination of reference signals.